What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an online sales tactic that lets a product owner increase sales by allowing others targeting the same audience—“affiliates”—to earn a commission by recommending the product to others. At the same time, it makes it possible for affiliates to earn money on product sales without creating products of their own.

The actual business model for an affiliate marketer is rather simple. It works like this…

You find a great product or service that offers an affiliate program.
You send potential customers to the website of that product or service using a special tracking link.
If that potential customer ends up making a purchase, you receive a percentage commission on the sale!

While the business model is simple, new affiliate marketers quickly find out that sending ready-to-buy visitors to the website of a product or service you are promoting is actually pretty tough!

Sure, some people get lucky and find a way to use paid advertising and still net a profit. But most new affiliate marketers find that after their paid advertising expenses, they never profit a dime. Actually, paid advertising such as using Google Adwords can quickly run your bank account dry.

Encourage Sharing

If you have an email that you think will get a particularly strong reaction from your subscribers, you can encourage them to forward the email to their family and friends. You will need to make sure that you have a way for new people to sign up and ensure that those who get forwarded the email don’t click on the unsubscribe button. As long as you can include details about these two factors in the email, you can ask your current subscribers to forward the email so you can find more like-minded prospects.

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